If someone wanted to do a 51%, why would they pay retail?
We are talking about purchasing every order here...
Why would they bother? Why wouldn't they just take that loot and have their own asic made.
Save money and be stealth until the hashes hit.
I still wonder why the 51% attack even comes up in any of these ASIC discussions.
How would anyone profit from that?
Seriously - think about.
Suddenly one day every miner (but 1) is unable to mine bitcoins coz some miner with >50% network power has modified their bitcoind to reject all external blocks and having >50% they might even be able to force that on the blockchain.
Then they can put whatever they like in the blockchain and cause havoc.
So what happens next?
That's the end of BTC - move on to BTC2.0 based on the blockchain before the moron who did the 51% attack
The person who did the 51% attack will very shortly have worthless BTC ...
Yeah I can see someone making a fortune out of spending a small fortune on ASIC ... NOT!
You really think any exchange is going to support a 51% attacked network and allow people to buy and sell until it's resolved?
The only reason someone would want to do a 51% attack would be to kill bitcoin,
but in reality that would only be for a short period of time - until BTC2.0 came out.